This is the first M&A process I go through, and I keep hearing the terms "discovery phase", "assessment phase". I appreciate this might be different depending on each company, but based on previous Broadcom acquisitions how many phases are there and what's next? Does "integration phase" come next?
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vmware.com will be staying around so there will be no need to immediately create anything. vmware will be a division of broadcom and will also include the other broadcom software assets (symantec, ca, etc)
Why not?
AD/email accounts give access to internal services. They could slowly process them and have everyone keep vmware.com for a few weeks or months, and just set up redirects.
Or, are you suggesting there'll be many laid off =)
I don't believe they are going to need email accounts for 30k+ folks.....
Multiple stages, and there's really no set standard for naming.
Discovery is basically that. Discovering everything you can about the company you're acquiring. Finances, operations, key intellectual property, patents, etc. That helps set the value and intricacy of acquisition. Assessment is tied to this. Discover it, then assess it's value or liability. And decide what to keep or toss. Benefits, EPIC2, and similar fall under this.
Integration is still further down. Discovery and Assessment are used for final negotiation. An initial best-guess value was set last year, but now it's down to specifics. How much debt is BC taking on, how many active lawsuits are they walking into, etc.
Integration will be very close to Day 1. That's creating all new user accounts, etc. For 30k+ employees, that'll be at least a week of effort. Then slowly adjusting permissions over the first month of employment. This will be kept easy. AD accounts and email for Day 1. Keep the existing Git, Confluence, JIRA, SalesForce, etc. If they need to transition, that'll be months down the road. Maybe even years. There are many Carbon Black assets that are still in transition to VMW, after almost four years.